On a CB, 10-20 is your location. What’s your twenty? Where are you?
It was one of the most used CB codes out there, and it is the most practical one. Nobody can help you, route you, meet you, or warn you about what is ahead until they know where you are sitting right now.
Not where you are headed. Not where you were this morning. Where you are.
The box
I think a lot of us treat being a Christian like checking a box.
You go to church. You pray. Maybe you read your Bible, maybe you do not. Maybe you own one, maybe you do not. Box checked, and that is about where it ends.
I do not think most people really know what the rest of it involves. The sacrifice. The discipline. The obedience. The actual work that gets done on a man through Him, which is not comfortable and does not happen on a schedule you pick.
I say that as somebody who checked the box for years. I was a Christian. I believed it. I also did what I wanted, went to church once in a while, and did not open a Bible at all.
If somebody had asked me “my twenty” back then, I would have told them I was a Christian. True answer. Useless answer. It said nothing about where I actually was.
The first honest answer I gave
When I started talking with the men I started walking with, early on, one of them asked me about reading scripture.
And I told him the truth. I said I do not really read my Bible much. I feel pulled to do it. I just do not.
I could have said something better than that. It would have been easy, and he would not have known the difference.
What he said back was simple. That pull is probably God telling you to do it. Maybe you should.
And I did. Not that day, and not perfectly. But that conversation is where it started, and it only started because I gave him my actual twenty instead of the one that sounded better.
You cannot be routed from a position you are not at
That is the whole thing, and any driver already understands it.
If you give a bad “twenty”, everything after it is wrong. The directions do not work. The help goes to the wrong place. Whoever is trying to reach you ends up somewhere you are not, and you sit there wondering why nothing is getting better.
Men do this constantly. Somebody asks how you are doing with God and you give the position you wish you were at, or the one you were at five years ago, or just the one that ends the conversation fastest.
Nobody can do anything with that.
“If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.”
1 John 1:8-9
Notice it does not say clean yourself up and then come tell Him. It says tell Him.
He already knows your twenty
Here is the part that should take the pressure off.
You are not giving God information He does not have. He is not waiting on the radio to find out where you are. The honesty is not for His benefit.
It is for yours, and for whoever is trying to walk with you.
“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.”
Psalm 139:23-24
That is a man asking God to tell him his own twenty, because he is not sure he can see it himself. I have prayed some version of that more than once.
So what is it
I am not asking whether you are a Christian. I am asking where you actually are.
When did you last open it. When did you last pray about something that cost you. Is there something you know He has been pulling you toward that you just have not done.
You do not have to answer me. But answer somebody, out loud, and make it the true one.
Mine, for a lot of years, would have been: believer, not reading, not obeying, pretty sure God was fine with it.
He was not fine with it. He was waiting on me to say so.
If you are out on the road and could use a conversation with another believer, hit reply when you are parked. No pressure and nothing to join.